Shelley Fralic: Could Surrey become Vancouver's version of Brooklyn?

Shelley Fralic says it isn’t unfair to compare Surrey to Brooklyn, N.Y. The suburbs are getting back their mojo and it’s now ‘cool’ to live in places like Surrey and Brooklyn.

Photograph by: Arlen Redekop Arlen Redekop
, Vancouver Sun

If you think it is far-fetched to compare Surrey to Brooklyn — that born-again and ultra-trendy New York City suburb that has become synonymous with hipster funk and gentrification — think again.

Because if ever there was an analogy between Canada’s fastest-growing city and the poor-boy-on-the block borough that was Brooklyn, it is this.

Today, unbridled growth and city-to-suburb migration are transforming both, as more and more renters and buyers, and businesses, follow the dual magnets of affordability and open spaces, snapping up homes, townhouses and new condos, and spending their money in their newly adopted communities, frequenting the services and shops that are helping create new economic infrastructures to replace those that once relied on the port, in Brooklyn’s case, and agriculture, in Surrey’s.

Both cities have also sloughed off their tarnished reputations — having long been spurned by urban elites for being the repository of crime and the low-income, uneducated, working-class masses — and are embracing rejuvenation and respectability with a new middle-class ethos.

When you look at Brooklyn and Surrey, it is clear something’s happening out there in North America suburbia, whether it’s on the bustling East River in New York, or right here on the mighty Fraser.

The burbs are getting back their mojo.

In Brooklyn, the century-old streets are lined with a new generation of transplants frequenting the local galleries and restaurants, the museums and music academies, the theatres and parks and colleges and universities. They are wandering the botanical gardens, craft breweries and the wildlife refuge and, of course, they are making Coney Island the chic place to play.

A story in The Guardian last fall noted that Brooklyn has been “hogging the culinary limelight” of late, and that Bon Appetit’s Best New Restaurants list included two in Brooklyn and none in Manhattan.

Simply put, Brooklyn is suddenly cool.

And Surrey is heading in the same direction. While it may not yet be considered hip to pull up stakes and head to Surrey in quite the same way it is for Brooklyn, it’s getting that way.

The new Surrey City Centre is an architectural jewel, and stunning new buildings like the planned new city hall, the civic library, the newly expanded hospital, the SFU campus, pedestrian-friendly plazas, along with vast tracts of industrial, agricultural and park land and all that SkyTrain-friendly and wallet-tolerant housing, have become a collective carrot for entrepreneurs and young singles and families looking to flee Vancouver for room to move at a reasonable price point.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Recent media reports indicate that many businesses are decamping from Vancouver to Surrey, including the RCMP E-division headquarters, and a number of businesses from the Punjabi Market at 49th and Main. Ten new towers, along with a five-star hotel and performing arts complex, all part of $1 billion worth of construction and residential and business development in 2012 alone, are a bricks-and-mortar testimony to Surrey’s suburban renaissance.

And the people are coming, 1,000 a month, flocking over the bridges south of the Fraser eager to embrace Surrey’s affordable housing and lower taxes, free and plentiful parking, vibrant arts and sports communities, the diverse and widespread shopping, and a no-nonsense forward-thinking mayor focused more on meaningful growth and cleaning up the streets than planting peas in time for summer.

Housing, of course, is the greatest community litmus test of all, and Surrey is increasingly where prospective Metro Vancouver renters and buyers are finding their dollar stretches farther, where they can get more space — in a condo or townhouse, or in that coveted single-family home with a yard — for that rent cheque or mortgage payment.

According to recent statistics published in this newspaper, the price of the average detached house on Vancouver’s eastside is $1.08 million. For a similar house in central Surrey? $579,000. Townhouse more your style? A 1,200-to-1,400-square-foot, three-bedroom townhouse in Surrey is $312,000. If you can find something for that price in East Vancouver, it will be a condo with one bedroom and half the square footage.

You might say that Surrey, an under-40-minute scenic train ride to and from the downtown Vancouver business core, is becoming everything Vancouver once was, which means it is no longer the ugly step-sister bedroom community relegated to the outer limits and the never-ending butt of jokes. Oh sure, there are issues — five murders in January, for one, and all that open space working against a sense of singular community, for another — but the growing pains are to be expected when your population of half a million is poised to surpass Vancouver’s by 2040.

Could it be that Surrey’s official motto, The Future Lives Here, might well be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How long, one wonders, before Vancouver — which is increasingly an unfriendly collection of expensive self-contained enclaves with no central heartbeat and a fractious, misdirected community plan — becomes the suburb.

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